Portrait of a Chaotician
by ThePreciousHeart
Summary: Just a trio of vignettes inspired by The Lost World, all centering around the character Ian Malcolm and each concerning his experiences before, after, and during the events of the movie.
1. During

It isn't until three of them are all crammed together in a trailer, eyes wide and bodies still as stone as the T-Rexes prowl vigilantly outside, that Ian realizes in a flash why his stories did nothing to dissuade Sarah from coming down here.

She'd sat patiently with him while he recounted in stern, solemn tones of warning what exactly had gone wrong with Jurassic Park, and why Hammond's idea was doomed to fail from the start. It wasn't a subject he tended to bring up often; Sarah's inquisitive questions usually led to unburying memories, perfectly-detailed and as fresh in his mind as they had been several years ago. On the couch in front of the TV, on a drive back from a lecture, once even in the bedroom, wrapped in a sleepy embrace- she had never ceased asking him about the dinosaurs, mindful of his reluctance to open up about it but also deeply curious and intent on satisfying a thirst for knowledge. In retrospect, Ian probably should have seen this coming, from her insistence on the topic to the way her eyes sparkled when he spoke on it, no matter how brief such statements might have been. In a way he had sensed her enthusiasm, and tried his best to turn her off the subject by describing how the tyrannosaur had fractured his leg, how the raptors had roughed up the kids and how four people had died, and how it was a miracle he himself, along with Sattler and Grant, had even gotten off the island in one piece…

Well, in his case, it had been more like two pieces. Several, actually, as the injury hadn't been a clean break. But that was beside the point. The point Ian had always intended to make to Sarah was the simple, logical fact that _dinosaurs are dangerous, no matter what time period they're living in._

But her scientific curiosity had driven her to defy all of Ian's warnings and light down on Site B without telling him. And in some way or another, Ian feels responsible. Once he had heard from Hammond of her whereabouts, he had begun to mentally run over all those stories in his mind, wondering where he had failed. It occurred to him then that he hadn't properly placed the blame. Had Sarah, perhaps, taken from his stories that Jurassic Park was based in human failure, understaffed and under-planned and serving as an experiment in the arrogance of scientists to believe they had a right to bring back extinct species? Ian himself had made that last point more times than he could count… Had she viewed the dinosaurs as less of a threat than the humans, believing they would grow tame when handled properly? Though Ian can't pinpoint where he had gone wrong with the stories, he knows undeniably that he _did_ go wrong, and is now paying the price.

And, he thinks as the T-Rexes peer in at him with those terrifyingly intelligent reptilian eyes that had featured in every one of his nightmares since the incident, after all, Sarah doesn't know the half of what it did to me. They hadn't begun regularly seeing each other until he'd started to gain notoriety, his story either ridiculed or adored by the polarized press, and Ian figured he needed someone to latch onto to help weather the coming storm. Who better than his beautiful colleague who had come to see him in the hospital in Costa Rica, bearing a small bouquet of flowers and the explanation, "I thought you could use some company?" She hadn't been around for the worst of it after he returned from Isla Nublar. She knew almost nothing about the sleepless nights he'd suffered through, the dreams so vivid he'd thought they were real until he woke up hyperventilating and sweating through his sheets. She didn't know about the poorly-timed panic attacks that snuck up on him, mostly in the apartment, sometimes in the car, once or twice outside the lecture hall just after he finished speaking. By the time Sarah came into the picture, he'd gotten himself somewhat under control. The nightmares were never as bad when he lay beside her, and telling the stories over and over to her helped lessen the dark sway they had on him. Surely if Sarah had seen Ian in such a critical state, she would have never gone to Isla Sorna, if only for the sake of her mental health.

Now, Ian is forced to realize that he didn't convince Sarah at all, he only helped persuade her. And god dammit, all those trauma symptoms are starting to come back to him in full force- fine time for Sarah to become acquainted with that part of him. Already his breathing is speeding up, harsh and loud beneath the T-Rexes' angry roars. A cold sweat has broken out all over his body, and his vision is blurring. Thank God Nick stands between him and Sarah, because he's starting to shake, and he wouldn't want her to have to feel that. His heart is pounding, and he just wants to run screaming out of there, run back to contact a helicopter and lie down on the floor as it whisks him away. Failing that, what Ian wants to do more than anything is throw up, and he doesn't even care if it gets on anyone's supplies. A nasty taste is rising in the back of his throat, and his stomach, already doing somersaults at the sound of the T-Rexes outside, begins to churn away unpleasantly…

The worst part, he realizes somewhere in a calm, detached part of his brain, is that throughout all those terrible months of nightmares, never once did anyone he loved figure into his fantasies. And now he's here again, and Sarah is right here with him, and somewhere out there Kelly is anxiously waiting for him to make good on his word, and if anything happens to either of them it'll be Ian's fault. And he wouldn't be able to live with that knowledge. The stress is tenfold now that he's not just looking out for number one.

Fortunately, this is the exact kind of thought to snap Ian out of his mounting panic. Fighting the urge to gag and freezing his body against the tremors, he chances a glance over at Sarah, whose face has gone white. She's breathing just as hard as he is, and Ian realizes that she must be scared out of her mind. This is her first experience with the deadliness of dinosaurs, after believing that they were harmless for so long. Nick as well has never experienced anything like this. Both of them are counting on Ian, the dinosaur veteran, to lead them out of here alive. And it's up to Ian to get them out of this mess that he unknowingly got Sarah into in the first place. Now is not the time to lose his cool.

 _It's okay,_ he longs to whisper to Sarah, but he's not sure if she'd be able to hear him over the noise of the dinosaurs _. It's okay, honey, I'll make sure we all survive if it's the last thing I do… I promise. I know I'm always the unreliable one… but this time, you_ can _rely on me._

Then the trailer rocks, pushed by an increasingly incensed tyrannosaur, and all comforting words are driven from his mind.


	2. After

Having been married three times, Ian Malcolm now considered himself to know a good thing or two about proposals. They weren't his strongest suit, but he figured he must do pretty well on them, because so far each one had worked on the woman it was intended for. The first time, back in his twenties and fresh out of college, he had gone all out in proposing to his college sweetheart Lydia Pike. There had been balloons and confetti dropping from the ceiling, a crowd of onlookers applauding, a full orchestra bursting into the Love Theme from _Romeo and Juliet-_ well, that last one had been in his mind, but it was still a rather lavish proposal. When he had become involved with Tracy Westerberg in his early thirties, Ian scaled it back a bit by proposing in private, on the balcony of the beach house they had rented together for the summer with a full moon up above. Then when that relationship fell apart, Ian decided to pull an old trick out of the book for his next proposal, to Natalia Curtis in his mid-thirties. He proposed to her at a restaurant by slipping the ring into her drink, which she noticed right away but was too flattered to tell him how silly the idea was.

Sometimes Ian wondered if, beyond the fact that he did at the time love the women he dated, he only kept proposing to them because he wanted to see how many variations on the same theme he could play before getting tired of it all. There had to be some kind of Guinness World Record for it. _Most Times Married, Most Times Divorced_ … no, _Most Times Creatively Proposed._ An award for the commitment-phobic.

After having had three wives, three kids (one with each), half a dozen paramours and a hell of a lot of responsibility and mistakes to own up to, Ian thought he had reserved the right to claim to be an expert on the subject of marriage and proposals. _And my first rule is, Don't go through with them!,_ he sometimes joked. Other times he liked to play up the fact that he was still on the market- _I'm always on the lookout for the future ex-Mrs. Malcolm._ But while women were one of his favorite pastimes, for a while Ian wasn't interested in anything too serious. Marriage was great fun, yes, but it was also messy and had the possibility to produce nasty side effects. _One could say the same thing about my field of study._ But the pleasure of chaos outweighed the pleasure of marriage, and so Ian concentrated on putting more effort into his theories than his relationships.

Now, however, that had all changed. Ian Malcolm was nearing his mid-forties and found he still had a proposal left in him. And though he called himself an expert, he was now at a loss for ideas. Never before had the circumstances leading up to the proposal been quite like this. Never before had he run from bloodthirsty velociraptors, chased after a T-Rex in his car, or toured the media circuit with his girlfriend. In fact, during the time of the first three proposals he hadn't even done those things alone.

Once the media coverage of the San Diego incident had died down and Kelly had been sent back home with her mother, Ian had almost expected Sarah Harding to fall right into his arms the moment the door closed on Natalia and Kelly. They'd both had a long, rough few weeks, having to calm down from the dinosaur chases, deal with the harassing press, and supervise Kelly at the same time. It gave them hardly any time to really communicate with each other, in between giving interviews and catching up on much-needed sleep. Now that it was all over and settled, Ian had half-hoped that he and Sarah could sit down and discuss where they stood with each other after Isla Sorna. He usually dreaded these heart-to-heart talks, but then again, they were rarely his idea.

However, no sooner had Kelly and Natalia left than Sarah, turning to the expectant Ian, announced, "Well… I guess it's time for me to head out too." She smiled and sauntered past Ian, and he spun around to stare at her retreating back, blinking a few times just to make sure he wasn't seeing things.

"Wait wait wait, just hold on… one minute, Sarah," he stammered, following her to the bedroom where she had thrown her pack full of supplies on the day they returned from Isla Sorna, never to be picked up until now. "I- I wanna talk to ya. Are we… uh, are we good?"

Sarah grabbed her pack in both hands and straightened up, throwing it onto her back before turning around to look fully at Ian. "You tell me, Ian. Do you think we're good?'

A little surprised, but also intrigued by her emboldened response, Ian shrugged lightly. "Well, I'd, uh, assume we're good because you haven't left until now. Am I right?" Hesitantly he edged closer to Sarah, taking in every detail of her face and just barely holding himself back from reaching up to brush a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Whenever she wasn't working, she always wore her hair down, and it was always getting in her face and irritating Ian by proxy… Many times she had accused him of taking more interest in her hair than she did herself.

Ian snapped out of his memories of Sarah to focus on the real thing before him. There was no trace of a smile playing on her full lips, but the warm, sparkling depths of her eyes betrayed her emotion. "I have to go back to work, Ian," she commented, shouldering her pack further and evenly meeting his gaze. "They've missed me out at the zoo. It's time to head back home now that all this hoopla has died down."

The corner of Ian's mouth twitched at the word "hoopla." He muttered, "As long as there aren't any dinosaurs out in those cages," which elicited a small, short laugh from Sarah. She looked away from Ian, but he still noticed her lips curve into a smile. Immediately relief gushed through him- they were good. Sarah's annoyance with him for showing up on Isla Sorna to rescue her hadn't held over after their disastrous adventure together.

"No, no dinosaurs," Sarah said, pushing past Ian and moving back into the main room; as she passed him, Ian caught sight of the mirth on her face that she tried valiantly to suppress. He smiled inwardly at that, pleased to see that she was failing to keep her cool, and followed after her.

"Are you- are you going to come back?" he asked Sarah upon exiting the bedroom, and at last she turned and let him take in her full, beaming face. Swiftly she closed the distance between them and gave him a peck on the cheek. "I dunno, Ian, it depends on if any of those new lion cubs sweep me off my feet."

Now he too presented a smile as he reached up and brushed her cheek with the palm of his hand. "Well, y'know what they say- you can win over any woman with kittens." Sarah fondly rolled her eyes, even as she moved in closer to the embrace Ian longed for.

Eventually Sarah did come back to Ian's place, and life resumed its normal pace for them as if nothing remotely related to dinosaurs had ever happened. And their constant interactions had built up and led them to this point, where Ian waited on popcorn in the kitchen while fondling the small jewelry box in his pocket, nervous beyond belief.

He knew in his heart that it was ridiculous for him to feel this way. After three successful proposals, what could possibly go wrong? But as had already been established, his relationship with Sarah was quite different than those other relationships had been (which might be fortunate, in a way, because his past three marriages had failed). His experiences on Isla Nublar and especially Isla Sorna had left him a changed man, one with perhaps a better understanding of what meant the most in life. Besides, he and Sarah hadn't even really discussed marriage before. Sure, their relationship had recently changed for the better- Ian certainly didn't take Sarah's presence for granted, and Sarah was a lot more thoughtful and less likely to make rash decisions behind Ian's back now- but though they couldn't call it "casual," just being together was pretty fulfilling.

But Ian felt almost instinctively that it was time to take their relationship on to newer and better heights, and it was he, the marriage veteran, who had to be the one to do it. For all her long-term dating history, Sarah had never even been engaged before. Hopefully this afternoon would change all that.

The microwave beeped, and Ian swallowed to quell his growing nerves. _Ridiculous._ Gingerly he reached out and pulled the microwave door open before it could beep again, reaching inside to handle the overflowing popcorn bag with care. All the while as he poured popcorn into the waiting bowl on the counter, he felt anchored by the box in his pocket as if it weighed a hundred pounds. And he distinctly felt Sarah's presence behind him, waiting on the popcorn. Just as he thought of her, she called out to him- "Come on, Ian, the movie's about to start."

"Gotcha," Ian replied, keeping his back turned. This was one of their small pleasures in life- finding some movie on TV that looked interesting and then watching it together on the weekends, whenever one of Ian's children wasn't visiting. Both of them found it helpful in unwinding after a week of work, and also as a good bonding opportunity. _Well… talk about growing closer,_ Ian thought, letting his hand slip into his pocket and open the small box. He discreetly pulled the ring out and turned it over and over in his hand, hoping he'd at least gotten the size right, before hiding it in his palm and turning to bring to popcorn over to the couch, where Sarah was waiting.

The movie started only a minute or two after Ian sat down, but try as hard as he might, he couldn't keep his mind on the plot for more than a few seconds. A shame too, as Sarah seemed to be engrossed, which meant it must actually be a good movie. All Ian could think about, though, was when the first commercial break might be. Every time he reached for the popcorn, he played the move he had planned to make over in his mind. It couldn't be long now… he just had to hold on for a bit…

He'd meant to wait for the commercials. But the next time Sarah went for the popcorn, Ian found he couldn't control himself anymore. His hand seemed to move in slow motion as he reached out alongside Sarah, timing it exactly right so that as soon as she dug into the popcorn, Ian captured her hand in his.

"Ian!" Sarah laughed right away, sounding more amused than exasperated. "Still pulling that old trick, huh?"

Without saying a word, Ian only threaded his fingers through hers, pressing their palms together so that she felt the hard, circular object in his hand. Fervently he hoped she didn't notice his palms were sweating.

Her brow furrowed in confusion, Sarah glanced down at their conjoined hands, clearly wondering what was up. She tugged her hand away from Ian's, and he let her take the ring along with her. She held it aloft before her eyes, the crease in her forehead deepening further, the action onscreen completely forgotten. "Ian, what's this?"

Ian took in a deep, long breath. He had wanted to say the words exactly right, but there was no time for any sweeping declarations of love. So he blurted the proposal out in a rush, half-stumbling over his words. "Sarah, will you, uh… will you marry me?"

Right before him, Ian watched Sarah veer straight through a "you have got to be kidding me" reaction and right into "oh my God you're serious." Her wide, expressive eyes grew huge, filling up half her face. The hand that held the ring froze in place, fingers trembling, while the other flew up to cover her O-shaped mouth. She stared at Ian for what felt like an ice age before turning away and looking down, letting a canopy of long hair fall over her face. It was only then that Ian realized how loudly his heart was beating- at least it sounded loud to him- and he wished for it to stop.

The commercials that Ian had so longed for came on, and still Sarah sat frozen in place, hiding from Ian behind her hair. A few agonizingly long seconds passed, and all of Ian's nerves came back in full force. _I screwed up. Shit, shit, shit._ Now that it had been said, it couldn't be revoked. Ian cleared his throat, wondering if he should say something more to Sarah, but he couldn't get any words to form on his lips and struggle past his throat. He reached out dumbly, feeling the strange urge to brush her hair back, but withdrew when he noticed Sarah's shoulders were shaking. God,he really _had_ screwed up. What a big mistake, how had he talked himself into this…

"You- you don't have to say yes or anything, y'know," he tried insisting to Sarah, hating the TV's chatter that filled up the quiet space between them. "I made a mistake. I'm sorry, Sarah, I really, uh… I don't know. I, uh, I don't know what I was thinking… I shouldn't have-"

Ian's words shriveled up as Sarah turned back to look at him, a bright, trembling smile painted across her face. She reached out and enveloped Ian in a hug, one hand folding around his hand and the other snaking behind his neck. " _Ian,"_ she whispered, and her voice was choked with… laughter. Now it was Ian's turn to be surprised as Sarah pulled away, her face aglow, only to move in closer and give him a long, passionate kiss on the lips.

"So, I'll take that as a yes?" Ian said when they broke apart, unable to keep the joy from showing on his face too.

In response, Sarah slipped the ring on- it fit perfectly- and then hugged him again, squeezing his body close to hers. "You silly fool," she said in his ear. "Of _course_ I will."


	3. Before

Sunlight rained down upon the back porch of the modest one-story abode, filling the air with its oppressive summer heat. It glistened off of the splendorous soap bubbles that hung in the air and nearly broiled alive the father and daughter who were playing with them. Wiping the sweat off his brow and sighing, Ian stared transfixed at the bubbles, watching them pop one by one as Kelly looked on with plastic wand in hand, enraptured.

When all the bubbles had popped, Ian reached over and gently took the wand and container of liquid soap from Kelly's hands. "Look- look here, Kelly, I want to show you something. Now, today you're going to learn about what I do, what I study- and that… that is chaos."

Kelly nodded silently in response, an interested smile on her face. She was used to her dad's lessons by now and knew it was best to watch his creative demonstrations first, then ask questions later. She also knew that even a year after he had left her mother, Ian still felt awkward about these arranged visits, and tried his best to be the good father he wished he was whenever Kelly was around. If he wanted to teach her something, let him- wasn't that what dads were for? The jury was still out on how well he lived up to his desires, though.

"Now, watch this," Ian said to Kelly, dipping the wand into the bubble solution and coming up with the clear liquid dripping off of it. "When I blow this, where- where do you think it's going to go?"

"Uh…" Kelly considered it. Though the sun was scorching outside, there was little relief, for no breeze was currently stirring. She pointed downwards. "It's probably gonna fall, because there's no wind."

"Good guess, good guess," Ian encouraged, before pursing his lips and blowing a long stream of bubbles into the air. Just as Kelly had expected, they hovered in the air for a few moments before slowly descending and popping against the hot surface of the porch.

"You were right!" Ian declared, glancing over his shades at Kelly. "Good for you, kid. Now we're, uh, going to guess again. If I blow the bubbles, are they- are they gonna land in the same place?"

Already Kelly could kind of see where he was going with this, so she chanced a guess- "No, they won't."

A chuckle escaped Ian's lips as he raised the bubble wand up again. "Well, we'll see." He blew against it, and just as the bubbles formed, a slight blessed breeze kicked up, sending the bubbles scattered off in a new direction. Ian set the wand down, looking pleased with himself, and Kelly flashed him an admiring glance.

"You see, the bubbles didn't just, uh, fall to the floor this time because the wind came," he said. "Tiny factors affect a larger outcome. And, uh, that's chaos theory."

"So it has to do with unpredictability?" Kelly said, happily anticipating the rambling lecture that was sure to come.

Proudly, Ian beamed at his daughter. "Simply put, yes. Let's- let's go inside and discuss it some more." He stood up, and Kelly followed suit, picking up the bubbles as she went- sometimes she felt that if she didn't clean up after Ian every once in a while, he would find himself buried in all the objects he had put down and forgotten to put away again.

"Can we talk about it over ice cream sandwiches?" she said longingly, thinking of Ian's "surprise" that she had discovered that morning in the freezer.

He gave her a knowing look before heading inside, not wanting to verbally acknowledge that she had found out about the surprise before it was actually shown. "Y'know, I think we might have what you're looking for. Been peeking around again?"

Kelly only laughed, and the door shut behind them both.


End file.
